Private Detectives are a dime a dozen in this city.
You don’t have to look far beyond the bright lights to find the dirt, so there’s a living to be scraped for the shamuses plying their trade.
I used to be just like all the rest, drifting from case to case and thinking nothing would ever change.
Until she walked through my door.
It was hotter than Hades. I was sitting in my office drinking a glass of whiskey and wishing for rain.
There had been thunder and lightning the night before, but no rain and the heat had continued to build.
No one would be sleeping tonight. Tempers would be simmering.
I took a long, slow drink.
Sirens rose and fell in the distance. In the street below my window someone cried out.
Maybe someone who needed help from a private eye.
I considered throwing down a business card which had details of my low low rates on the back, but it was still too hot to move, and I still had a finger of whiskey to work my way through.
I was thinking about how much better my life would be if only my drink had ice in it, when the outer door to my office opened. It was the slightest of sounds but, as I liked to tell attractive strangers in bars, I was a good listener.
The lock to the outer door had been bust all summer and there was nothing to stop anyone from walking in off the street and robbing me blind.
I had nothing worth stealing, so wasn’t worried as I watched a silhouette appear on the other side of the glass panel of my office door. The silhouette didn’t knock, it turned the handle and walked right in.
I’d been about to have another drink but put the glass down on my desk. As a professional private detective, I believed in making a good first impression.
The woman who was now standing in my office did not look impressed, though.
I figured I better try harder.
“I’m Granger,” I said. “Thom Granger, private eye.” I followed this with my best world-weary smile, then asked, “How can I help?”
She looked like she was thinking. Like maybe she was regretting walking into my office and was about to leave.
My charm offensive must have worked, though, because she did not walk out. Instead, she looked me in the eye and said, “I want you to find my husband.”
I nodded sympathetically and asked her to take a seat. I took out a notebook and a pen. I’d been a policeman once, a long time before, and some habits clung on.
I turned to a fresh page and held the pen over it.
“When was the last time you saw your husband?” I asked.
“The day before last,” she replied. “It was in the Chapel of Rest, in his coffin, a few hours before he was buried.”
I put the pen down. I’d tracked down missing husbands before for clients, but they’d all been very much alive.
Still, as long she was prepared to pay my fee, I wasn’t going to turn the case down. No matter how strange it sounded at that moment in time.
I asked, “Can you tell me how he went missing?”
“No,” she managed to say before she started to cry. I gave her time. I sat and looked at her. When that started to feel uncomfortable, I looked at the almost empty glass of whiskey and the bottle by its side. I was about to move onto the spider’s web in the corner of the room when she took out a tissue and began to dab at her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “This morning. I went to his graveside to refresh the flowers. I was worried the storm would have spoiled the ones that had been left out. But when I got there, there was a hole in the ground and his coffin was broken open and empty. He was gone. It was so horrible. And the people at the cemetery say they have no idea what happened, and the police are doing nothing. I am desperate, Mr. Granger. Desperate enough to hire even someone like you.”
She had been through a traumatic time, so I let the insult pass without saying anything, but added ten dollars to my daily fee when I told her how much I’d charge.
I’m no saint.
An hour later I was standing beside an empty grave. I ran my flashlight over it. Whoever had done this, had trashed the place. The headstone lay on its back in the dirt and was split down the middle. The ground where the coffin had been placed looked like it had been torn open. And the lid of the coffin itself was shattered.
The violence of the scene made me shiver despite the heat.
I turned away. I didn’t have any CSIs to call on to examine the desecrated grave and the only technology I had was flickering. I turned the flashlight off to save the failings batteries and headed back out of the cemetery.
It was on the edge of the business district. Office blocks loomed over it.
My client had told me that her late husband had worked in one of these buildings. He’d been in finance, working eighteen-hour days, six days a week. I wondered if he had been able to see the graves below from his office window. Wondered if he had ever stopped and thought if there was more to life than making money.
He had been forty-five when he had died of a heart attack.
Some people would have said that was a crying shame. I wasn’t the emotional type.
I took out the flask I’d primed with the last of the whiskey from the bottle in my office and took a drink. It was the dead of night, and I had a corpse to find in a city of a million souls.
I put the flask back in my jacket pocket and took out the picture of the missing husband his widow had given me.
The picture had been taken before the coronary, before the mortician had worked his magic so the body could lie in an open casket.
He had looked older than his age. His hair was thinning and his face was bloated and decorated with the broken veins of a drinker. His bloodshot eyes told the same tale.
The picture also showed the ring he wore. It wasn’t a wedding band. That was on his other hand. The ring I was interested in was a substantial piece of gold.
It had been in his family since his grandfather’s time, according to his widow. They’d had no children to hand it down to, and she was set for life once the life insurance policy paperwork cleared, so she’d decided he should be buried with the ring.
I wondered how many other people had known there were hundreds of dollars lying in that grave just waiting to be plucked off a cold finger?
That was motive enough to break into the grave.
But why take the body as well?
Working on other cases, I had heard dark rumours of body parts being sold for illegal use in medical procedures. A healthy organ for use in a transplant could change hands for thousands of dollars.
Surely, the components of a dead body would lose their value quickly, though?
I replaced the picture, retrieved the flask and had another drink. I had a whole bunch of question but no answers yet.
I decided to start looking for the ring first. Tracking down stolen valuables was more familiar territory for me. And hopefully the ring would lead me to the stiff.
I set off walking. I headed away from the business district to an older part of the city where run down buildings were crammed into narrow streets.
The first pawn shop I saw waited on a corner under a broken streetlamp.
I was working on the assumption that whoever had stolen the ring would have come to a place like this, where no questions were asked, to get some ready cash.
There were bars on the windows, bars on the door. I found a bell and kept my finger on it.
A shadowy figured approached. He was gaunt and unshaven. He peered through the door and snarled, “What do you want?”
It wasn’t polite, but at least he wasn’t brandishing a shotgun in my face. That had happened to me before around here.
I held up the picture. “I’m looking for this ring,” I said. “It was stolen from the man who is wearing it here.”
The man squinted at the picture through the bars then said, “Yeah, that ring was pawned here earlier tonight. It’s through the back. Cost you eight hundred if you want to buy it.
A sneer crossed my face and found its way into my voice. “I don’t buy stolen property,” I told him.
He scowled. “The ring’s not hot. How can it be? It was pawned by the man in the picture, and you said he owned it.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it, because I couldn’t think of a thing to say.
The case had just got a whole lot stranger. Dead men don’t walk into pawn shops and exchange their property for ready cash.
Or at least they didn’t in the city I knew. The city of grime and hustling and chasing the dream.
The street started to feel as if it was spinning around under my feet. I needed to get a grip. To get back to basics.
I went with Private Detective questioning 101 and asked, “Did you see which way he went?”
A finger tipped with a filthy fingernail pointed across the street.
I turned to see steps leading down from the street to a basement door. A neon light glowed above the door and the sign which hung over it.
I took a deep breath, crossed the street and descended into The Weary Bones.
The inside of the joint was dark and dank. The smell of things that had gone off a long time ago hung heavy in the air. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could make out shadows hunched over drinks at tables lining one side of the space.
The bar ran along the other wall. Rows of bottles on raised shelves behind it cast shapes in the gloom.
There were a row of bar stools but only one was occupied.
As I approached the bar, no one was paying me a blind bit of notice. The drinker at the bar had his back to me and the barman was pouring him a fresh beer.
In the endless heat of that night, the thought of a long, cold beer was mesmerizing.
I reached the bar. It was chipped and stained. A fly made its way slowly along the chipped and stained surface. More hovered in the air.
I asked for a beer.
The barman turned to me. He wore a scruffy waistcoat over a shirt that had been white once upon a time. His eyes narrowed as he said, “It’s cash only. No cards.”
My credit rating was in the gutter so that suited me just fine. I placed a couple of bills on the bar.
He scooped them up and examined them closely before placing them in the till. Then he poured my beer and handed it over.
I raised the glass and took a drink. It was wonderful. I sighed as I wiped the back of my hand across my lips and said in passing to my fellow drinker at the bar, “Nothing like a cold beer on a hot night.”
He looked up from his drink and turned to me. I recoiled in shock. Because he was covered in flies.
They made their way through his thinning hair. They crawled along his bloated face and over the broken veins which decorated his skin. They moved across his bloodshot eyes and along his lips, which were pursed into a frown.
“Who are you staring at?” he asked in a hoarse voice. A fly emerged from his open mouth as he spoke.
I was rarely lost for a smart answer, but all I could do was keep staring at him.
Not because of the flies anymore.
The flies were yesterday’s news.
I was dumbfounded because I knew who he was.
I lifted my glass. Slowly, because I was shaking so much, I downed my beer. Then I managed to say, “I’m a private eye. I’m working for your wife. She hired me to find you.”
The man who I’d recognized from his picture did not look pleased. Perhaps he did not believe in happy endings.
Or perhaps being dead was clouding his outlook.
And he was dead. I was sure of that. So were the flies which were swarming over him.
I took a deep breath – and regretted it immediately. The smell of death rising off him made me feel sick.
In this heat, he was decaying quickly.
As to how a dead man had found his way from the grave to a seedy bar where he was having a beer…?
Well, I had no idea.
I was out of my depth, so I did what people who feel lost do in bars all over the world night after night.
I ordered another drink.
“And one for my friend,” I told the barman.
The dead man laughed bitterly at this. “I don’t have any friends,” he said. “I was always too busy working, trying to live the dream and make my fortune. But it turned into a nightmare. I was stressed all the time, I couldn’t sleep and I had a pain in my chest for days on end. I thought it was indigestion.”
He trailed off and looked into his beer, as if there were answers to be found there.
I needed to know more, so to try and get him talking again, I said, “Your wife told me you had a heart attack.”
He kept staring into his glass as he said, “That figures. I remember being in agony. Then there was nothing. Until I heard a thunderclap. It was muffled but I knew what I’d heard as I lay there wondering where I was. It was dark and claustrophobic. I began to panic and lashed out. I broke through the wood which was over me then scrambled through the dirt above that. I had no idea I’d been in a coffin six feet underground till I emerged into the open. I was confused and angry. I thought I had been buried alive.”
“Is that why you broke your headstone?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No, that was already split in two. I think it must have been struck by lightning.”
When he said this, a piece fell into place. I’d seen enough classic old horror movies to know that electrical storms could bring the dead back to life.
I’d also thought the living dead were confirmed to the screen, but the evidence defying that was sipping a beer next to me.
“So, what did you do next?” I asked.
“I went for a drink. Or at least I tried to. I didn’t have my wallet with me and without cards I couldn’t get served. So, I pawned the family ring and came here. I was going to just have one drink then go and find my wife and ask her why she had me buried when I wasn’t dead.”
I couldn’t look at him for a moment.
The flies knew, I knew, but he didn’t know.
I wasn’t shy of having awkward conversations, but this was a deuce.
I tried to soften the blow and said, “Your wife cares about you deeply. All she wants is for you to rest in peace now you’re dead.”
He had the glass halfway to his mouth.
“You mean…” he began.
I nodded. He was filling in the gaps himself and didn’t need me to say anything else.
A fly crawled along his hand and onto the brim of his glass. He stared at it and a tear ran down his face, enveloping a fly clinging to his face on the way.
“What should I do?” he asked.
“Go back to your grave,” I answered. “I will help.”
“You’re right,” he said morosely. “But before I do, there’s one thing I want.”
I had the awful feeling he was going to tell me he wanted to see his wife one last time. I imagined her repulsed reaction.
But it turned out I was worrying about nothing.
He rubbed his stomach and said, “I’m famished. I’d like to get something to eat. I’ve a hankering for brains.”
I knew a twenty-four-hour burger place nearby were everything they served was dripping with grease and it was best not to think what was in the patties.
But I doubted even they served brains as part of the mix.
“Food needs to wait,” I told him. “It will be light soon. Let’s get you back to the graveyard.”
We finished our drinks and left the bar. Then I walked with a zombie through the last of the night. The heat was intense. The world around us felt as if it was at breaking point.
As we neared the cemetery, a rumble sounded in the distance. The storm was close.
I was no longer hoping for rain to take the sting out of the heat.
Rain would turn the open grave into a quagmire and I couldn’t see the zombie descending willingly into that.
Better that the ground was dry.
We reached the graveyard side by side. A lightning bolt flashed through the sky.
I counted to myself: One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, Three… was as far as I got before the thunder sounded.
If the way to measure distance from a lightning strike I’d learnt when I was a child was right, the impact was two and a half miles away.
Give or take.
The grave the zombie had climbed out of was a dozen paces away. There was still no sign of rain.
But there was another bolt of lightning.
It struck the next grave along and the thunderbolt was instant on its heels.
I was left reeling. I swore, blinked, rubbed my face. The zombie was still. Its attention seemed focused on the grave that had been struck.
I saw that the headstone had been split in two. And I thought: No!
My heart began to race. The sweat coating my skin turned ice cold. And I swore I could hear movement underground.
Something scrabbling. Digging.
The surface of the grave moved. A sliver of pale white speckled with dirt appeared.
My guts tightened as I realized that I was looking at bone. It was visible through the flesh of a hand which had decayed and shrivelled away in swathes.
The hand was reaching up clawing at the air, and now a second hand was coming into view. And a head. A pair of rotting eyes peered out, followed by the stump of a nose, and a mouth. The lips had been stripped away and this zombie’s teeth were exposed to the night.
Teeth that smiled.
I swear on all that is good that the living dead creature grinned, before pushing itself free of the ground to stand on its feet.
It had been buried in a suit and the remnants of this hung over remnants of skin and muscle. Bugs, that had been rudely disturbed while they were feeding, scurried over the re-animated corpse.
I wanted to run. I wanted to scream. But I was gripped by fear and all I could do was stand there and stare as the zombie began to stagger towards us.
Its mouth was moving. It was trying to speak, but its vocal chords must have been eaten away because its entreaties were lost in the stagnant air.
The storm had passed by now. The rain had once more not come and the lighting and thunder had been brief but devastating.
They had brought another dead man from his grave.
The dead man who I had been hired to find back when I thought I understood the world turned to me and said, “Are you armed?”
I was licensed to carry. I nodded.
“Then you need to put a bullet in that thing’s brain. It is the only way to stop it.”
Bile rising into my throat, my hand shaking, I fired. One dead man staggered backwards and fell to the ground, his skull shattered, his brain decimated.
Another dead man looked at me. I saw a glint of the living man he had once been.
“And now me,” he said.
I was horrified. “I can’t,” I said. “You’re not like that thing. You have a widow who loves you. You can still think, still feel.”
He shook his head and said in a quiet, steady voice, “As time passes and my flesh and my reason are corrupted, I too will be driven to attack and feed on the living. I can sense it. I can feel it happening already. But it can’t come to that. I can’t allow it. You can’t allow it. Please.”
I knew he was right.
Knew there was no other way.
“I am sorry,” I said and I did what he asked. Then I reburied him and his kin.
Dawn broke over the city as I walked away. The case was closed. The dead were in their graves.